


Overturned

by dyad (johnnycake)



Series: In the Bleak Midwinter... [3]
Category: Peaky Blinders (TV)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Love, Romance, World War 1
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-17
Updated: 2019-08-17
Packaged: 2020-09-05 22:48:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,817
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20281117
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/johnnycake/pseuds/dyad
Summary: The night of the tunnel collapse. And how Tommy escaped.





	Overturned

**Author's Note:**

> so remember when i said i only had one other idea for this series?? well that turned out to very much not be true. i have several more ideas, so this is gonna continue for a while heehee. 
> 
> if you're new to this series, pls make sure to read the series notes to understand what's going on.

It had been a long time since Tommy knew if it were day or night. He’d lost count of how many hours he’d been in the dark with only lamps for illumination around the one-hundred mark. How many hours it’d been since then, he didn’t know. It could’ve been another one-hundred for all he knew. It could’ve been less. He wasn’t really sure. Everything had become one massive blur of grime and dirt and darkness and unending fear.

At the end of the day – if day even still existed – nothing else mattered.

This was what his life had become.

They – Tommy and his men – kept digging deeper, farther, faster, trying to get to the space beneath the German trenches to place mines and then detonate them and kill more people who probably, in the grand scheme of things, didn’t deserve to die.

It was something he was trying very hard not to think about.

But for the moment, the tunneling had stopped. The pickaxes and shovels had been put down. The carts and sandbags had been forgotten. Everything was deadly silent and eerily still.

The silence made Tommy more nervous than the noise.

Noise was predictable, knowable, known. In the silence, anything could happen.

The worst things happened in the silence.

Men died in the silence.

He had too many men under his command, under his specific protection, to be anything other than unnerved by any amount of unpredictable silence.

He sat with his back pressed up against the dirt wall of the tunnel, his thin white shirt that was still somehow too thick in the sweltering heat, covered in the mud that surrounded them. He stared down the tunnel, his lips pressed tight together, his jaw clenched, watching over his men in their fitful sleep. They’d been up for three days already, digging as fast as they could towards their imprecise destination under the German trenches. He’d wanted to keep working, wanted to avoid the silence for as long as possible, but people stopped working effectively when they got so tired. Unfortunately, everyone had to sleep sometime. So he allowed it now.

Things had been going well.

Almost too well.

This silence now felt more dangerous than all the others that had come before.

Absently, his hand went to press against the letters he kept over his heart. When he worked, they were stuffed into the waistband of his trousers. In the silence, they were over his heart.

They were the only bit he had of her, the only bit of her soul he could touch. He’d memorized every word of them, every single letter, though the ink had smudged into illegibility ages ago.

He would rather die than let them go.

If he closed his eyes and concentrated, he could smell her hair, feel her hand on his cheek, hear her laugh, see her deep brown eyes, taste the rain that had been in the air the last time he’d seen her.

It had been two years since he’d seen her. Two very long years.

She was all that kept him from descending into madness. Just as she always had been. The only difference now was it was more acute.

The entire tunnel shook as something rumbled overhead. Loose dirt from the ceiling.

Tommy opened his eyes.

Rumbles like this were common. Regular. Usual. But something about this one didn’t seem to be any one of those things.

The dirt kept falling from the ceiling. Just little specks.

Then it came in clumps.

Then Tommy realized what was happening. But he knew it was too late.

“Everybody up!” he shouted, his voice echoing down the tunnel, waking the men in an instant, but they were still too trapped in sleep to fully realize what was going on.

Tommy’s heart pounded in his chest.

“Get to the ladder as quick as you can!” he screamed. His voice was bordering on hysterical.

Then it began to happen, almost in slow motion, like something out of a horror novel.

It started at the end of the tunnel, too far away for him to be able to do anything about saving the men already trapped there.

That part of the ceiling collapsed.

Then the rest of it did.

“Tommy!” he heard Freddie shout.

Him and Danny Whizz-Bang were the closest men to him, the closest ones to the ladder.

He opened his mouth, ready to tell them to run for it, though they all had to crouch to fit into the brown and black hell that had become their home.

But he never got that far.

A moment later the world ended and he was covered in wet black.

* * *

The first thing Tommy became aware of was how difficult it was to breathe. The second thing was the taste of dirt in his mouth. The third was the darkness. Pitch black. Unending. No sign of light or hope or knowledge of which way was up and which way was down.

The memory of what had happened came back to him slowly.

The dangerous silence. The trickle of dirt. The clumps falling from the ceiling.

The tunnel collapsing on top of every single one of his men.

They were all trapped with him, trapped in this wet, suffocating black.

And worse: there was nothing he could do to save them. Nothing at all.

Tommy screamed, even though his lungs screamed for air, even though he knew it was using up what little air he had in whatever pocket he’d ended up in. He couldn’t hardly move his arms, but he wished there was something harder than packed earth for him to slam his knuckles into until they bruised and split and his blood flew everywhere.

This was his fault. He knew it.

How could he wear the Sargent Major title with any amount of pride after this?

If they stripped him of all his titles he would deserve it.

He half hoped they would.

But first he had to survive this.

He knew what he had to do. He had to start digging. Upwards. And pray that was the right way.

And yet, somehow, he didn’t want to.

How easy would it be to just give into the wet, suffocating darkness? Let it take him? Bury him with his men? A captain going down with his ship.

Oh how easy it would be.

Oh how badly he wanted to let it happen.

But then a voice breathed in his ear, one simple word that changed everything.

_Miri. _

Tommy sucked in a breath. Miri. He couldn’t leave her. Not now. She needed him. She needed him. And he couldn’t leave her alone in a world that had only been cruel to her, only tried to break her.

She needed him to come back.

Or she would break apart like shattered glass.

Tommy freed his arms, lifting them above his head, and began to dig through the dirt surrounding him, trying to drown him, trying to asphyxiate him in ending blackness.

It was hard work, digging through the mounds of dirt, keeping them from falling back on him and killing him once and for all. It was harder still not to let them.

_Miri, _his mind chanted on an endless loop. _Miri, Miri, Miri._

Miri with flowers in her hair in summer.

Miri whose skin was pale was ivory and softer than silk.

Miri whose laugh sounded like bells or wind chimes.

Miri cooking for him in her caravan.

Miri spinning in the sunlight, her dress flying out around her.

Miri smiling. Miri smiling.

Miri telling him she loved him.

_Miri, Miri, Miri._

His everything. His light. His sun. His rock. His only port in a storm.

_Miri, Miri, Miri._

He would not leave her. He would not abandon her. He would see her again.

And he would tell her, he loved her. And then, if he was very, very lucky, he would marry her.

The digging was tiring and his lungs ached, burning for air that didn’t exist. The world began to closed in around him and bursts of light started to appear in his vision. His movements slowed and then stopped and he lay in the dirt, unsure of how far he’d gone or how much further he had to go and he realized something horrible.

He couldn’t go any further.

He was going to die in this hellish black after all.

Tommy’s eyelids fluttered as he gasped for air and tears pricked the corners of his eyes.

He had failed.

He’d failed his men.

He’d failed his country.

And he’d failed Miri.

He wasn’t coming home.

_I’m so sorry, Miri. I didn’t want to leave you all alone. Please...please forgive me._

_No, Thomas. You’re coming home. You promised._

It started out as a shifting, something he was certain he imagined, then the dirt began to fall more quickly. Around him not on top of him.

Tommy looked up.

A slender hand poked through the dirt, a hand he’d known all his life and watched grow.

_Miri. _

She’d come for him. She was taking him to heaven. He was certain of it.

He reached for her.

_I’ll save you,_ she whispered to him. _I’ll bring you home._

The hand grasped his and pulled him through the dirt into the light.

Tommy came, sputtering through the dirt into bright daylight. For a minute, he was certain he was in heaven. Then he looked up and saw the hand he was gripping didn’t belong to Miri at all, but to Danny Whizz-Bang. Tommy knew Danny had saved him, but some distant part of him still believed, no matter what the undeniable facts, that it was Miri who’d pulled him through the dirt into the light.

She’d saved him.

She always did.

“You alright, Sargent Major?” Danny asked. He was covered in more dirt and mud than seemed possible. Beside him stood Freddie Thorne, looking similarly dirtied and concerned.

Tommy could only nod. Then he gasped, “Has anyone else come through the dirt?”

Danny shook his head. “Only us.”

Tommy looked away, nodding again. “Alright. Let’s wait until dark to see if anyone else does. Then...then we’ll make our way back to the trenches and find someone to tell what happened.”

They were in the middle of No Man’s Land at the moment. A dangerous place to be. A dangerous place to sit and wait. But Tommy refused to do anything else. He had to save as many of his men as he could. Even if that meant risking his life.

It was nothing he hadn’t already done before.

He could never be sure how long they waited, smoking what few cigarettes they had left, not speaking, only staring at the overturned earth beneath him, but in the end it didn’t seem to matter.

No one else climbed through the dirt.

The 179 was gone.

They were all that was left.

**Author's Note:**

> man i am proud of this. pls listen to stay with me by clint mansell and licht und schatten by yutaka yomada cause they're the anthems of this fic.


End file.
